[MUSIC] Frank Kermode, the great narrative theorist, in his book The Sense of An Ending, talked about middles as a metaphor for our lives as well. He wrote, men, like poets, rush 'into the middest,' in medias res, when they are born; they also die [in the middle]. And to make sense of their span, they need fictive concords with origins and ends. Such as give meaning to lives and to poems. It's a really wonderful insight that our need for stories. Our need to have entelechy in our lives is something that we long for because we're born into the middle of things. There was a world and a life going on before we got here and there will be after we depart. Eventually though, a story needs to reach its climax. Aristotle thought that there were two elements to a good climax of a narrative. The first was Peripeteia or reversal. Is there a, a moment of reversal in The Fellowship of the Ring? >> Yeah. Of course. I think Gandalf's death, changes the story. in ways that seem really important in the moment. >> Oh, it, it's so upsetting. Now, you think he's dead, so does the Fellowship. you don't find out until the next volume that he's, spoiler alert. >> Spoiler alert. >> [LAUGH] >> That, that he's alive. >> so. >> I'm thinking about them wandering around the desolate landscape. And it's just yeah, it's so, it's so, desperate and it was such a depressing time in the story. >> Oh, it's so, it's such a downer. uh-huh. >> And particularly since they spent so much of The Fellowship of the Ring harping on the need to have Gandalf there. And then to have him suddenly disappear right when they need him. It's like, I know, I know. It's really the nadir of the entire book. There's some equally profound reversals of fortune in later volumes. But you can see the rhythm that Tolkien was establishing here. He was having a reversal in this novel. And, in fact, he doesn't have nearly as profound a recognition scene in The Fellowship of the Ring as he does in later volumes. But he does have a little one. Alright, now Aristotle thought that the other element of the climax of a narrative was an Anagnorisis, which was the recognition scene that follows the reversal. At your very bottom, you have this recognition that turns the story toward its end, its goal. What's a, what kind of small recognition? That Frodo has that, that really can brings us toward the close of volume one. >> Well, when he realizes that despite by the fact that the Fellowship was built to take the ring to Mordor. That it actually going to be effective than to go by himself. >> That, that's right, and in, in typical romance fashion, he has to have this recognition over and over again. with, with stress all of course along how romance, revels in repetition. The ins't, because that recognition is something that he has to come to terms with several times in the trilogy. We understand it as part of Tolkien's greatest meaning. So the greatest theme for the book is that this is a burden that Frodo is going to have to bear for himself. The fellowship is powerful and supportive. but finally he has to do it for himself. Kermode talks about how that ending recognition brings what he calls the benefaction of meaning to a story. It's a, it's a marvelously re, resonant phrase. it's a kind of concord that It spread retrospectively on all the events that have led up to it. When you understand their, how they fit together. How when you thought you were just wandering. When you thought you were lost in the middle. In fact, you were moving toward something that made some kind of sense and that's, that's what Kermode meant by the benefaction of meaning. But most stories don't end there at the climax do they? Most stories you know, have something that we, we call the denouement. the French word means unraveling. Unraveling the threads of the story kind of winding down would be a, an English equivalent of unraveling. Oddly enough we colloquially, in English use the opposite term we talk about tying up the loose threads of a story. You know, which is just the opposite of the literal meaning, but it's the same principal. It's not any real denouement in The Fellowship of the Ring, we'll talk about the denouement of the entire trilogy in a, in another session. But The Fellowship of the Ring just ends without recognition really. Novels famously have trouble with denouement. it's really the most artificial part. Think about the, the wrapping up of some classic novel like, like Pride and Prejudice. You've got an entire final chapter dedicated to just telling you what happened to each and every minor character, you know. It begins with what happened to Mrs. Bennet, the heroine's mother. And how she succeeded in marrying off. or getting taken care of her various unmarried daughters. And it has you know, a paragraph on Mister Bingely and Elizabeth's sister Jane and their happy marriage. And it has a little sentence or two on Mrs Bingley that really desperately wanted to marry Darcy and failed. Elisabeth got him instead. You know, it's just, it's totally artificial. It has no organic unity and it's not part of the entelechy, it's the afterthought. Cinema has really developed all kinds of clever ways to do that tying up for. You know, they often, you know, during the credits you'll see what happened to the characters later in life. Can you, can you think of movies like that, that? >> yeah. The third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, there's that little mini epilogue while the credits are rolling. Where you see Elizabeth and her son and Will coming back up out of the ocean. Exactly and, and sometimes they do it to comic effect like the, the, the Avengers movie, where they're, you just see the various super heroes seated around a, a greasy spoon having burgers and fries. I mean that's, that's really a, a hilarious example. Or you'll see, sometimes it's very solemn and you'll have a black screen with white lettering. With each character's, you know, fate. How, what they did Or sometimes it's you know, tongue in cheek like, like, George Lucas's early movie American Graffiti had. You know, each of the characters going off and doing really unhappy things same with Animal House. John Belushi's famous movie. >> One of my favorites is in The Sandlot. The end of The Sandlot where you find out that one of the characters has married the life guard that he had a huge crush on throughout the whole movie. And they have 12 children or something [LAUGH] >> So let's end with the observation that, that denouement, that kind of after-story, is literally after the story. It's not part of the logic of the beginning, middle, and end.
